Jeb Bush met with tea party on immigration

Jeb Bush met with several tea party officials in Florida last month to talk immigration reform as the Gang of Eight bill was nearing completion.

The former governor, and his son, Jeb Bush, Jr., met with with representatives from TheTeaParty.Net, Tea Party Express, The Tea Party News Network, Revive America and others on April 11, POLITICO has learned. Members of former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s staff and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus’s staff were also present.

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“Obviously dad has been doing a lot on the immigration debate for years,” Jeb Bush, Jr. told POLITICO. “We’ve been on the issue for a while… We spoke about general conservative principles that we don’t want to forget about.”

Jeb Bush co-authored a recently released book, “Immigration Wars” with Clint Bolick in which they argue against a pathway to citizenship. But he then said in March that he could back a path to citizenship if it didn’t provide incentives for illegal immigration. “This is a very encouraging time, because if we can get immigration right, imagine, there’s possibilities of cats and dogs living with one another in other policy areas as well,” Bush said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

The April meeting was part of an effort to get the tea party engaged in the immigration debate.

TheTeaParty.Net is leading a coalition of groups on the issue. It supports immigration reform but has not endorsed the Gang of Eight bill. Instead, it has drafted a document called “Secure America Now,” which includes seven principles crucial for members of the tea party on immigration, including calls for “assimilation” programs and tougher border enforcement.

Niger Innis, the chief strategist of the group, said the discussion with Bush helped the group in drafting the document, which he has since shared with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), among others.

“The purpose of the meeting was to bring the tea party movement into the discussion of immigration,” Innis said. “We knew the immigration issue was coming fast down the track and we knew we didn’t want to be in complete opposition.

“From a policy point of view, it was important for us to come up with a set of principles we were for … to let people know that we falsely get labeled as a party of ‘no,’” he added.

Bush Jr. also said a broad coalition of groups should voice their opinions in the immigration debate.

“We are trying to have a substantive debate with as many conservative groups as possible,” he said.

Following the meeting in Florida, some of the same tea party leaders were invited by Rubio for a discussion on the Gang of Eight bill in his Capitol Hill office. Although there was no major agreement, those in attendance said Rubio reassured them about the process by promising to be available to continue the discussion and that the final product would end up more conservative than the Gang of Eight’s proposal.

“We got the meeting because [Rubio] was intrigued we wanted to be engaged in the discussion at all,” Innis said. “But having met with Gov. Jeb Bush was the cherry on top of the ice cream.”